Category: Books

The 2006 Winter Reading Challenge includes a category “Native American Author” again (it did in 2021 which doesn’t seem like so long ago, but it’s been half a decade?). Instead of doing what Dave Ramsey would have approved, which is to say get a book from the library, I ordered this book on Amazon (also buying it on a credit card, Dave). But, in my defense, it was only $3, and I needed to pad my order to $35 to get free shipping on a heating element (since returned as it was damaged in transit, and I’ve since returned the other book that I bought at the same time because someone spilled something on the pages in the bindery, which meant the first 50 pages of the book were unreadable but the cover was pristine–hey, Amazon, one out of three is bad). At any rate, after finishing Different Seasons, I tore into other books to get back on track in my quest for the full 15 (reading a book in all categories in the Winter Reading Challenge), which is more fun than the Whole 30, that’s for sure.

At any rate, this book is half traditional Native American songs, with preference given to plains and southwest Indian tribes, and the other half is contemporary Native American poets, and although many of the names do not sound especially Native American, one presumes they have more tribal ancestry than many United States senators.

The songs are often presented in concrete form, with the words making shapes on the pages, which led me a couple of times to have to re-read the poems when I figured out that the words were going in a different direction that I thought. I mean, they make sense, the songs, in their simple ways, and I guess the concrete form made it so they filled pages where they would not otherwise.

The poetry is okay in spots. A little much about being Native American in places, and as you know, I prefer poetry which I can relate to, not something that’s affixed to explains something separate from me (and with the subtext, culturally if not textually, that I could never understand). Is Joy Harjo, whose collection I read for the Winter Reading Challenge in 2021, represented? You betcha! And as this book is copyright 1996, it’s even before she became Poet Laureate.

I’ve mused before on Dover Thrift Editions: For a long time, they were cheap paperbacks with classics that have fallen out of favor, and here I got one in 2026 “new.” Although I have to wonder if this was printed recently or is if it’s part of someone’s dwindling 30-year-old stock. The cover price is $4, and I did pay less for it. But they are still a thing, on Dover’s Web site and everything. Good on ’em.

I didn’t flag anything to mention in particular, so nothing will really stick with me. But that’s so much of poetry in general and, increasingly, in things I read. Ah, well, I have this collection of book reports to remind me.

For the 2006 Winter Reading Challenge‘s “Money” category, I was a little conflicted. I mean, I don’t have many books on investing–not enough so that they’re seeded for quick discovery of the genre in the stacks of Nogglestead. So, instead, I bought this book at ABC Books last weekend, putting a Dave Ramsey book on a credit card, and I expect he felt that in the Financial Force.

This is a short book, 134 pages (perfect for the Winter Reading Challenge!). Even more perfect is that it’s designed to be a quick intro, a gift book (with “To / From” lines on the frontpiece). So its contents are basic: Cut up your credit cards. Pay in cash. Pay down your debt. Tithe. Negotiate. Buy secondhand. That sort of thing. Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses, especially if it puts you into debt.

And the “chapters,” such as they are, are really three or four paragraph summaries–maybe a page, maybe two–about the topic followed by a couple of pages of quotes/bible verses/proverbs sort of related to the topic. And we get one or two pages, which is three or four, short testimonials about the Ramsey program and how he helped people of various stripes get back onto track. And the book includes a number of worksheets you can use to begin your journey to freedom from debt and whatnot. So lightweight even for its light size, but designed as I said to be a giveaway and maybe gateway to the program.

A couple who got into this and, probably, the MLM component of it ran workshops at church for the program, but I didn’t participate, and they’ve since left the church. Which is probably why some of the people who did are out of debt now (having gone to Ramsey’s radio station to do the whole scream thing and everything) and now have multiple income streams and rental properties and drive Porsches a decade later whilst I’m wondering how I’m going to tackle major repairs at Nogglestead with thin income but too much for health care marketplace subsidies.

Oh, but don’t worry about me, gentle reader. Like the other Philosopher says, grant me financial austerity, but not yet. I am not yet eager to downsize my home (with its mortgage payment less than modern rents), sell my valuable possessions and collections, or, heaven forbid, work on a government contract (this last the more likely of the three). Also, this book is now 25 years old; one wonders what the modern equivalent numbers would look like (a $1000 emergency fund? That covers an appliance or single car repair these days).

But I do take some solace in some of the things I do right:

• Shopping secondhand, at least for gifts and sometimes clothes.
• Not buying a lot on the spur of the moment these days, heating elements and sundries aside.
• We’ve been a little light on the tithing after a decade of being heavy on the donations, but I’m trying to work some more into our spending.
• I’m resisting taking on another car payment, and our main drivers are 20 and 18 years old and hopefully will last a couple more years.

Dollars-a-day habits remain, though, and the Whole 30 diet is not a cheap one; we’re eating probably $10 a day in grapes, maybe $10 in other varied produce and nuts for snacks. Which is not bad, but they’re not the meals. And rice and canned beans are right out.

It does make me think I should pick up another source of income. Looks like blogging, writing books, hawking cute kitten t-shirts, and writing twee little apps (including some based on cute kittens) is not doing it for me.

Dave Ramsey. He tells a bit about his story in the book (one section is “Dave’s Story”), but man, this guy has been around a long time. When I was working at my first startup around the time this book came out, my office mate listened to him on the radio. And he’s still around. And even this week, you can find stories talking about his strategies (Couple eliminates $43,000 of debt in under a year — here’s how, which does not mention Ramsey by name). He’s certainly made a lasting mark, although maybe just for some people. Too bad. The whole of society could use some of his common sense.

The 2006 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “500+ Pages,” and, to be honest, I had a little trepidation about what I would find to fill that category. And here I had just been talking about my shelf of Stephen King which I might never get to. As it turns out, not only did I get to it, but we had a second copy of the book which had been in my son’s room for a time and then moved to the parlor when he cleaned his room a couple weeks or months ago. It was my mother-in-law’s copy, sans dust jacket, which she had loaned to my youngest when he was grounded from electronics, and he managed to make it through the first story and onto the second, but that’s when his grounding ended, and I’m not sure he has opened a book since.

So, the combinations of those factors, thinking recently about the Stephen King shelf, and talking about 11/23/63, which my mother-in-law enjoyed as a book and, as she has started watching the miniseries and is not enjoying it, and encountering a copy of this book led me to think of Stephen King for this category, and I checked some of the books. Early novels are not 500 pages; later novels are too much so. But, it turns out, this book weighs in at 527 including the self-indulgent afterward that some authors tack on.

As you might know, gentle reader, this book is a collection of three novellas and a short story which King had written in the gaps between his early successful novels Carrie, Salem’s Lot, Cujo, and The Shining (he’s about to write Christine according to the afterword, although the title is not given, but 44 years later, we know). Three of the four, all the novellas, were made into major motion pictures. This guy was a juggernaut in the late 1970s and 1980s, as hard as it might be to imagine now that he’s been around forever.

The book contains:

• “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” (made into The Shawshank Redemption, the biggest of the films or at least the one most fondly recollected) is about a banker, Andy Dufresne, who is convicted of murdering his wife even though he proclaims his innocence (he is, in fact, innocent). The story is told by Red, who is a long-time inmate at Shawshank Prison and is known for “getting things.” He gets Andy a rock hammer so he can continue his geology hobby, and the story covers decades of the lives of the inmates at Shawshank. One morning, they cannot find Andy and discover he has been tunneling from his cell to a wet wall for decades and has escaped to a new life with an alias he had set up before he went into the can. The coda finds Red paroled and on his way to meet Andy in Mexico. Haven’t you seen the film?
   
• “Apt Pupil” (made into Apt Pupil, appropriately enough) is set in the early 1970s. A middle school aged boy recognizes his neighbor as a superintendant of a concentration camp and wants to hear all about it. They end up mutually dependent and mutually blackmailing each other to keep the secret. I really didn’t like the story because the first half of it, 100 pages or so, is two evil people doing evil things. Finally, it starts to move in the second half, but King introduces sympathetic characters, but you know he’s going to slaughter them. Well, it turns out, not all of them, but for much of the book you really don’t have anyone to really sympathize with. Not the boy, not the war criminal, not even the boys’ self-involved and self-indulgent parents. The book ends with more implied bloodshed, not a real climax, really. Looks like the film changed it in significant ways–setting the story in the 1980s instead of the 1970s, but it should definitely have the macramé-decorated feel to it. The boy is changed to a high schooler in the film, and the end is apparently ambiguous and not as final. I haven’t seen the film; I haven’t had the urge to see it; and the written story has not made me want to.
   
• “The Body” (which became Stand By Me) tells about a group of boys who learn of a dead body and then hike and camp several days to see it. It’s sold as a coming of age story, but the double-effect narrator is a wealthy horror writer who is dissatisfied with his current state of writing by rote for money and who longs for those days again. I haven’t seen the movie in probably 30 years, but I wonder what they might have changed from it.
   
• “The Breathing Control Method” (not made into a movie) is a double story of sorts. A midling employee of a law firm is invited by a partner to a nondescript club with no obvious dues where the “members” tell stories. One Christmas Eve, a retired doctor tells of a case where a single mother carried her baby to term, but has an accident arriving at the hospital and she delivers the baby after her death.

So: I mean, the prose moves along, for sure. King wrote very frankly for the time about things that might have been shocking then, but then were not shocking, but now are prohibited. The stories are all set in the past, although I guess “Apt Pupil” was fairly recent past. He uses the word nigger and the word Republican both as perjoratives–I am pretty sure that all the stories have that, the baddest word, in them, although maybe “Apt Pupil” only uses the German equivalent. I don’t remember him using the word Democrat for anything, so I guess that was just normal to him even then. So the guy didn’t just start slagging on those who disagreed with him in the George W. Bush administration.

As I might have mentioned, I have a shelf full of King, and I’m not sure when I’ll be inclined to get to them. Maybe I’ll read one or two this year. Although if I get a hankering for thick tomes, maybe I should finish the second volume of The Story of Civilization (it’s been three years since I read the first, and at that pace it will take me almost as long to read it as it took the Durants to write it) or the Summa Theologiae which I received as a gift in 2021 and which I have not started, but it looks nice on my shelves. More likely, though, I might pick up Herodotus or Thucydides (he says, having just heard lectures on them, but the lecture series is long and I’ll likely want to read other books as well when I hear about them).

First, though, the Winter Reading Challenge. With this book, I have hit five, which is what you need to read to get the mug. But I must press onward in my quest for filling all fifteen categories.

So for the In a Different Country category of the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, when I was gathering prospective reads for the categories, I grabbed Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, a literary novel elevating the bleks and putting white South Africans in their place which I read in college (in a copy I might have borrowed from the campus library as was my wont in those years) and later picked up in hardback. Undoubtedly, this is what the librarians wanted: a proper literary book with a proper literary message. Oh, but no. You get a Tarzan novel.

Not sure where I picked this copy up, but I do know that somehow I ended up with two copies of this book, both in the 1960s Ballantine printings with the hideous 60s covers. And I’ve been reading the Tarzan books out of order, apparently; I read both Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan, the first two books in the series, in 2009 and Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, the 11th book in the series, last year. This is the third book, but I probably did not have it when I read the other two books–although without its (or their, considering I bought two copies probably at different times), perhaps I did but it was shuffled in the move. Certainly, in those days, the Nogglestead library was not quite as double-stuffed and unkempt as it is now.

So, after quickly reviewing the previous book reports, I guess this is a pretty stock Tarzan plot. Something connives to get Tarzan to Africa, where wild things happen. In this case, Russian nemesis, presumably from the last book, escapes prison, links up with a colleague and some unsavory fellows, and they kidnap Tarzan’s son and tell Tarzan they’re going to have him raised by a tribe of cannibals. They connive to get Tarzan, too, and they do. And! As a bonus, Jane follows Tarzan to an unsavory meeting and they get the drop on her, too. So they strand Tarzan on an island not far off the coast of Africa which allows Tarzan to gather a troupe of apes and one panther to cross to the mainland and begin the chase.

So a series of set encounters occur, and Tarzan twice decided to sleep in the village of hostile natives, allowing the bad guys to get the jump on him. The book shifts perspectives from Tarzan to that of Jane and/or the bad guys, sometimes shifting into the past to catch up with one group or another, but allowing to end a chapter and section on a cliffhanger to be resolved a couple of chapters later.

So it’s an okay piece of pulp, and, again, an enduring character–this edition came out fifty years after the original, and I’m reading it over a hundred years after it was published. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice. Also, for something coming out at the turn of the 20th century, one (educated in the very end of the last century or beginning of this one) would think it all racism and misogyny, but although Jane is sometimes helpless when overpowered by stronger males, she definitely is not a docile character. And some of the African natives are bad, but some are good. You know, a little like real life. So the pulp of 1914 is more realistic and treats people more akin to people rather than message-conveying ciphers that you get in some modern cartoonish depictions. But that’s why I read the old books.

This book is a two-fer in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge; it would fit into the Science Fiction/Fact category, but I’m putting it into the Nonhuman Character category. Looking at the list, many of the categories whisper to me books that would also fit into the Science Fiction/Fact category as well. So I will probably listen to that whisper to get my two-fers.

And I must confess, gentle reader: I read this book about forty years ago. And my first exposure to it was from a song. You see, at some point in middle school or high school, I ordered an inexpensive cassette called Quarks and Quests from the back of a science fiction magazine. It was a “filk” (science fiction and fantasy folk music) collection which included “The Pride of Chanur” by Leslie Fish:

I spotted it in a library at some point thereafter–I remember it was in the original DAW paperback but with the library binding (basically, a hardback with the paperback inside and the paperback cover pasted on the outside). I picked up this volume in a book club edition in 2007 (the same day I bought After Worlds Collide, the sequel to a book I read in sixth grade and the follow-up recently, in 2024), so it’s a hardback with the paperback front cover on the front dustjacket. Weird.

At any rate, the book starts out on a trading station where the crew of a cat-like race called the hani are loading cargo when a nearly naked and bleeding creature that is keeping to the shadows bolts onto the ship. Spoiler alert: It’s an unknown-to-them species, but it’s human, and the kif, a race of raiders and pirates, want it back so they can torture it to reveal its homeworld so they can raid trade with it (::wink::). The haniem> on the ship, the Pride of Chanur, decide not to give the human up, so it turns into a bit of an interstellar war. Kind of like the song says.

So the book has a bunch of world- galaxy-building, detailing the internal politics of the clans of the hani and the relationships between the races. It alludes to the technologies the different species use, but it doesn’t go into excruciating detail. It has but a few set pieces–fleeing, hiding at the edges of a system, and so on, and then it culminates in a trip to the hani home world to handle some intrigue and a rush back to orbit for an epic space battle handled with a bit of a “Wait, what?” deus ex machina climax followed by a long dénouement.

Apparently, the book spawned four additional books over the next decade and are part of the same universe as Cherryh’s Downbelow books, of which I read Merchanter’s Luck for the Winter Reading Challenge in 2023. So it looks like James Wilder is not the only author to make a repeat appearance on the forms. Some librarian or librarians will think I don’t read widely at all.

Also, forty years later, I still pronounce the name cherry-h although I am sure that I have read her Wikipedia entry before (likely in 2023), so maybe someday I will remember it’s pronounced just Cherry because that is her real last name–the h was added to make it look less like a romance author’s name.

For the Part of a Series category in the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I decided to go with this book, part of the Harbison Mystery series which I picked up in November, signed, but not at the book signing. To keep you up-to-date, the Harbison mysteries include:

• Terror Near Town
• Tough Times in Grubville
• Sheriff without a Badge
• Murder at Morse Mill
• Homicide Near Hillsboro

And now this book.

So: In it, Sheriff Chet Harbison investigates a murder at a resort. The deceased is a doxy formerly involved with a deputy but dismissed from her job at the county clerk’s office for conoodling on the job. Meanwhile, the widow and mistress, now (whispers) lesbians, of the presumed murdered sheriff who faked his own death and got away at the end of the last book–these two are trying to maintain appearances in Jefferson County whilst using their inheritances to open a bar in St. Louis now that Prohibition has been repealed. The investigations and machinations conmingle with some series business (will the deputy’s journalist girlfriend go to Europe to work for the big national syndicate? Will the sheriff pass his kidney stone?), and eventually they find the bad guys and resolve the situation.

I might have mentioned that I have considered reaching out to Mr. Wilder to offer to proofread his books for him for a galley copy and/or a free copy of the book and maybe an insertion of my fictional kin into the Harbinsonverse. I should probably make that offer, as this book was full of missing quotation marks (full of the lack somehow), problems with formatting, and even anachronisms (referring to The Thin Man movie in January 1934 when it was not released until May of that year)…. I started noting them in my phone as I didn’t have the little flags in Branson with me. I don’t know if Wilder rushed to get it out or his normal pre-readers were unavailable, but this book definitely needed some pre-press work that it did not receive.

So a little underwhelming, but I’ll keep picking up the Wilder series because I still like the little tidbits of local history from a region where I used to live.

For the first book for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge, I picked up this book. I had thought that I bought it from the Quality Paperback Club around the turn of the century, but a blog post from 2007 indicates I bought it at a garage sale or a book sale in the waning months of that year. Presumably a used book store or a yard sale, as one of the pages has a stain on it and the bottom of the pages has a marker’s mark on it. Maybe I just thought about buying it from the Quality Paperback Club. Maybe not–I don’t remember how late into the century I might have dabbled in that particular mechanism for expanding one’s library rapidly.

So, the setup is this: Right before his wedding in 2000, the author’s fiancé calls it off. But he’s already paid for the honeymoon, a trip to Costa Rica, as well as the venue and reception. So he goes ahead with a party for the guests who were coming, apparently mostly his friends, and then he convinces his brother to come on the honeymoon with him–which gives him the idea, since he’s just been demoted or sideways assigned at work, to quit his job and spend a year traveling the world with his brother.

I mean, that’s the setup. He goes into flashback a bit about his relationship and his job and does a bit of self-reflection. He seems to come from money, and his job out of school was in the political realm, so about ten years into his career, he’s a highly paid and very connected Californian (Republican) lobbyist for the Irvine Corporation which is the major developer behind Irvine, California. He met his fiancé in Washington when he was working for a member of Congress and she was a graphic designer. From the flashbacks, it seems like he was always in the driver’s seat of the relationship, making plans for the both of them–moving them to Seattle and then California and then pushing. When she began having panic attacks, he proposed, and she separated from him for a while, but when they got back together, the wedding was on again until it was not. He reflects, eventually, that he really had a template for life and she was a part of it, but he doesn’t express remorse, really.

So: They go to Europe; his brother, a part-time but successful realtor with a number of rental properties, buys a Saab because they will let you pick it up at the factory and insure it for six months if you want to take it on a tour of Europe with it. So they do, staying with friends in Prague and Moscow and then driving through Turkey to Syria, gaining entry with a photo of the author with George W. Bush (he also has one with Gore just in case–the election had not yet taken place). Then! They take a tour of southeast Asia with stops in Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other places. Followed by a tour of the southwest United States, briefly (not really depicted). Then a tour of South America, including Brazil, Venezuela, Peru (and Machu Picchu), and Trinidad. Then, wow, they’re famous, apparently, for the dispatches that the author has been sending to his ninety-seven-eight-nine-year-old step-(great?)-grandmother, who has been sharing them with the other residents of her nursing home–and they’ve appeared in the local papers and whatnot. So he gets a chance to go on a junket without his brother all paid for, and then he and his brother go to Africa, where they can go on safari and slag on white South Africans before wrapping up the book. The book interleaves interactions with the step-grandmother, and at the end, she dies and leaves he and his brother a bundle. He goes on to become a travel writer, and the back cover of this book says his brother and he are traveling for a new book.

I intended to, and I’m going to, count this book in the Vacation category because it’s somewhere between that and memoir–it’s not a travel book, for although it does talk about the places he goes, the places are a little in the background to him being in those places, reflecting on his life and the world in those places, and trying to reconnect with his younger brother in those places. I cannot say that I can really identify with the fellow–he’s traveling the world from a place of fiscal security and, to be honest, confidence that I presume is borne of being positioned for and enjoying success at a high level. I mean, I would not try to talk my way across a border in the Middle East. Maybe I’ve ended up like a dog that’s been beat too much–not sure what percentage of my life just covering up, but it’s probably measurable. But I digress.

At any rate, an interesting book, at any rate. A bit rushed in the ending–the Africa trip is given pretty short shrift–but I’m not likely to seek out the sequels.

And, oh, how the world has changed in 25 years.

I’m counting this book, which I picked up in Davenport, Iowa, in 2024, as my first book read for 2026 even though I finished it on December 30, 2025. As I mentioned, I flip that particular calendar sometime the week after Christmas, and these days, finishing a book right before the turning of the year puts me in a bit of a spot because the library’s Winter Reading Challenge starts on January 2, so I can’t use books I started before January 2 for it. So what do I read for the next two days? I’m leery of picking something up that I cannot finish within the two days, so I guess I’ll nibble at some of the books on the chairside table which I won’t be finishing any time soon.

At any rate, this is a one-off Western from an author whose other works are fantasy, science fiction, or a blend of the two, so it is a departure. Dalton Phillips comes to Spider Rock, Arizona, in 1848, and he’s a bit of a Perry Sue in that he’s formally educated, a great piano player, the fastest gun in town, and a very good gambler. He has come to live with his uncle, the local preacher, but they conflict because of the aforementioned talents the man has. But he has a couple of fatal flaws or drawbacks, including consumption (one of the reasons he came to Arizona, the other being he’s a hellraiser), and he likes to drink and to carouse with the ladies of the saloons in which he likes to play piano, to drink, and to gamble. So he guns down a couple of people, develops a reputation, and then….

Well, he is unlucky in getting caught with the daughter of the Big Boss Man in town, and he is unlucky in trying to defend one of the ladies of the saloons to whom he feels a special connection. The latter leads him to being bested by a number of banditos and taken into the desert, shot, and left for dead, but brought in by a tribe of Apaches, including one he’d humiliated in town–and who remembers and resents. But Perry Sue, I mean, Dalton, is adopted by the chief, woos and weds the chief’s daughter, only to see them slaughtered by US Calvary led by a particularly odious colonel….

Well, afterwards, Dalton returns to town and sinks even lower, drinking with his last coins, and….

Well, I thought that part of the point of the book was to build a “protagonist” or merely main character whose fatal flaws led from promise to an ultimate wasted demise (a la Vienna Days and the kid from Running Scared, almost), but….

The self-destructive and “Unlucky” things that happen to the protagonist put him in a position to ultimately help (save) the people of town from an impending assault, and he redeems himself a bit, but the story finishes tragically (unluckily, and because the character grew and showed mercy).

The twist certainly makes the book a little more interesting, but the characterization is a little flat. I still look for the influences from popular culture which informed or inspired the writer–but whatever thoughts I had when reading the book are lost to me as I type this. So I continue to rate Ben Wolf above most self-published authors and some of the house pulp writers, but lacking a bit in the umami that makes someone like Don Pendleton pop.

So I have one more book of his to read before October (Winterspell) when I return to Davenport (perhaps) and buy one or more of his other books (probably, if perhaps comes true). So far, it’s the next in the Santa books that I’ll pick up and maybe what he’s written since unless Winterspell is really good.

As you might know, gentle reader, if you’ve been around blogs for any period of time, Gerard Van der Leun was a long-form blogger from way back who recently passed away, and Neo, with whom he had become romantically involved, put out a couple of books of his work as she had promised him she would. You know, I didn’t read his work all that much when he was alive and blogging–it looks like I linked to American Digest twice in 2004 (here and here, two consecutive posts in October 2004). Which is a shame, since the essays in this book are quite good. I cannot check to see what it was like now since it redirects to a payday loan site, showing again how ephemeral our life’s work on blogs will be. Fortunately, these books will survive.

At any rate, it’s a 250+ page book with 45 or 46 essays in it (the last, 46, is an epilogue, so I don’t know whether to count it as an essay per se). The topics range from light-hearted humor to rather detailed family-based life lessons tinged a little with regret at times. They’re proper and good essays, not blog posts. Van der Leun was born in the 1940s, spent some time as a hippie, got into publishing, lived in Europe for a while, and lived a proper writer’s life.

Man, it’s the life I’d hoped for, but I took turns into the mundane with a tech career and then working-from-home for decades which left me with little interesting to write about and but a blog to write it. So I feel called out a bit by the book, too, but that’s just my year-end mood talking.

So neo has done a good job putting this book together, and it’s worth a read. I’ve also just received the collection of his poetry that she put together as well, but I’m not going to dive into that until January where it will fit into the Short Story or Poetry category for the 2026 Winter Reading Challenge.

Well, this book (which I just bought in October) is kind of a Christmas book. I mean, it stars Santa Claus, and he’s trying to save Christmas, so….

Okay, here’s the deal: Santa Claus’ marriage is in trouble because he looked at a Victoria’s Secret catalog a couple of decades ago. On Christmas Eve, as he’s preparing his trip, the reindeer, zombified, attack. After he dispatches them, he discovers only young Rudolff is unaffected. He seeks help from a cantankerous but inventive elf recently fired for drinking who provides him with an engine he developed and which NASA and SpaceX are interested in. They outfit the sleigh with it, but then Santa finds that the MacGuffin is missing. It’s a Timepiece, a time and space device that allows him to deliver all packages around the world in time. Father Time has taken it and offers it back in exchange with a night with Mrs. Claus. Santa says no, and Father Time sets a couple of zombie polar bears on the elves.

Santa looks to find Father Time and to save Christmas and heads into the blizzard with the inventive elf, whose dark elf cousin comes along to protect him. Then booby-trapped puffins attack; they join up with their weapons expert Vladimir Putin (this being before the current war made him into the tabloid supervillain he has since become); they fight zombies but are saved by mermaids; dinosaurs attack; et cetera.

So it’s a bit of a romp where you never know what might happen next. It’s chock full of allusions to pop culture, including Indiana Jones, Die Hard, Frozen, and others. It’s the kind of thing I would have written in high school, kind of reminiscient of Samurai Cat and not unlike Rickshaw Riot.

So I am down to two Ben Wolf titles…. Will I make it through them both this year? Tune in and find out!

This is the third of the three local history books I picked up in our trip up north in 2018 which featured a brief visit to Mackinac Island, a famous resort island more famous because it does not allow cars, so people traverse the island in horse-driven conveyances or bikes. In the summer. I have to wonder if they use snowmobiles in the winter and presume so.

I read Mackinac Island: Its History in Pictures in 2018 and We Live on Mackinac Island in 2021.

This book, of course, is more like the former than the latter. A high-level history of the region chronologically, with a paragraph for various years starting in 1624 and continuing to the present day, although the story thins out toward the end “continued being a resort, basically” was the history. In its history section, it also goes far afield, talking about some of Schoolcraft’s trips in the upper Midwest and some of Pere Marquette’s trips which were outside Mackinac Island.

But it’s sprinkled with historical photos and starts with Indian legends and ends with touring information, so definitely a tourist take-away. Which I was and did.

We only visited the island for a couple of hours on a summer day. What did we do? Took a tour in a horse-drawn carriage. Walked around the fort. Walked around the lower commercial area a bit. And took the ferry back to the UP where we crossed the bridge back to the LP where we were staying.

When I showed my beautiful wife what I was reading, she started to daydream about places we could visit: Sanibel Island again, maybe the keys, Mackinac Island (staying on the island, perhaps)…. But, you know, that’s interesting and all, but when I do that sort of thing or when I’m on vacation, I think, “What would it be like to live there?” Like, for a period longer than a week? Wintering on Mackinac Island? Spending a year on Sanibel Island? I would still be an outsider–hell’s bells, I still feel like an outsider in Southwest Missouri even though I have ancestors from the area and I’ve lived here for sixteen years. Probably I’d feel like an outsider anywhere, and I would probably adjust and get bored living anywhere.

Perhaps it’s just best to visit places for a little bit and to read up on their history from the comfort of my own home.

I don’t know when I got this book, but I picked it up with a couple of other shorter books not so much because I’m looking to pad my annual stats (although I am), but because they were on the collapsed bookshelves where I last think I spotted Time and Again by Jack Finney which I wanted to pick up since I just finished Time & Again by Clifford D. Simak. I didn’t find the book I was looking for, but I did find this little Scholastic sports bio.

Bo Jackson was a big deal in the late 1980s, ainna? He played baseball and football and had a huge Nike ad contract–remember the Bo Knows commercials?

This book, written in 1990, was at the peak of his career. It’s kind of read that kind of bio, brimming with optimism. In 1991, a football injury caused him to miss time in the football season and the whole baseball season; he came back to baseball, won comeback player of the year, but retired in 1994. So he probably did not play long enough to get into either sport’s Hall of Fame–although he is the only athlete so far to have been a two sport all star. But that’s beyond the scope of the book.

The book itself tells about his youth, 8th of 10 chlidren and a bit of a J.D. but not a gangbanger or anything (apparently). It talks about him taking up sports after he straightened out and being a natural athlete who didn’t like to practice, but got through on sheer athleticism, much to his coach’s chagrin. He did multiple sports in college and completed his four years despite being drafted his junior year.

So the book’s a bit of a hagiography, of course, and geared to kids, although perhaps Jackson would not be the best inspiration for them, at least in how practicing and study of a particular sport go. However, he seems a standup guy. He’s remained married to his college sweetheart and has done charitable work after his retirement.

The book mentions, in passing, Deion Sanders, who was just coming into the leagues then. I mention this because I read a similar biography of Sanders in 2012.

So the hunt for the Finney continues after a couple of other books.

Whenever I read Clifford D. Simak’s books (such as City, Mastodonia, or Project Pope), I think they’re…. interesting. But not compelling, which is why they are spaced so far apart in the archives (2010, 2017, 2020, and now 2025). They all feature great sweeps of time or time-travel or distant futures and big questions and although the characters are not bad, they’re do not make for heroes or compelling reading.

At any rate, in this book, a spacefarer who has been missing after going to an isolated and potentially dangerous planet returns after twenty years, but before he does, an unknown person or entity approaches an agent of Earth’s security forces to explain that they should kill Sutton, the traveler. The unknown person is from the future, and he wants to make sure that Sutton does not write a book. Because Sutton, who died in a crash on the planet but was revitalized by the aliens there and put in touch with the entity paired to him, his Destiny, which all living things have. And Sutton will write his reflections in a book which will become a religious text at the core of a inter-time war between a faction that wants Man to be the supremest being in the galaxy and to conquer and rule through a corporation that lasts a million years and one that wants to recognize the dignity of all life, particularly androids, which are not robots but rather are humans who are built organically but are sterile.

So that’s the setup, but it’s not the setup–it’s the story as it is revealed two and experienced by Sutton, the main character, who is approached by both factions and others and struggles with his Destiny–well, not the entity he calls Johnny, but he tries to wrap his head around how it’s all going to come to pass, whether he’s in real danger since he has not yet written the book, and discovering the non-human abilities he has been given by the aliens–including the ability to die and to then revive from the power received from twinkling stars–or a ship’s engine.

So it’s a lot of hopscotching and cogitating on the questions about destiny and the paradoxes of time travel, but events just seem to happen to Sutton, and although he’s a sympathetic character, a stranger both to the future where the factions are sending him back in time and to the past (1981, which is 30 years after the book was written, so the future from the book’s present but closer to the book’s publication date than to today), the alien abilities which are revealed as the book progresses makes him a bit of a Mary Sue, and the ending indicates how one faction has successfully nudged Sutton to fulfilling his destiny. So it smacks a bit of nudge and behavioral economics which I find unpalatable.

So I might have a couple of more Simaks lying around, but it is likely to be another half-decade or more until I get to it if I find it.

I do think I have a copy of Time and Again by Jack Finney around here somewhere, a 1970 book with the same title which also involves time travel. Maybe I’ll pick that up sometime soon (when I find it) just because it would seem to be just the right time to do so.

Of all the sets of authors’ books which I would complete in 2025, the smart money would be on the Ben Wolf books I bought in 2024 and 2025 especially as I have stated my goal to read them in case I am again in Davenport, Iowa, in October. But it turns out I have completed the three books I bought from Julian Lynn at ABC Books in 2019–I previously read Divine Fruit in 2019 and Yoga’s Devotional Light in 2020. This book took me a while because the title sort of seemed like it would be hints at diet and whatnot, but that’s not what it is at all.

First, though, a story from the ABC Books book signing. I guess I was talking to Mrs. E., who used to attend our church, about church or other people from church before picking up the three Hindu-influenced books by Ms. Lynn (which are unsigned for some reason, or at least this one is). After I left, Ms. Lynn expressed surprise that a church-going person would pick up her books, and I guess Mrs. E. eventually gave the author an answer she could accept: He is a poet. Given that Divine Fruit is a collection of poetry, maybe she thought I bought them all in solidarity with a fellow poet. Truth be told, I buy too many of these books both to help out ABC Books and to encourage the authors.

At any rate, this book is not a dietary guide. Its basics are that the Four Gates are considering:

1. The short term affect on my vitality
2. The long term affect on my vitality
3. The short term affect on society’s vitality
4. The long term affect on society’s vitality

It comes in an early chapter, so it’s not like I am spoiling the whole book for you.

It focuses a lot on the concept of vitality, which is the, I dunno core energy of your person, breathing exercises, and self-improvement the yoga and Hindu way.

So it’s not as deep as say post-sesshin talks from Shunryu Suzuki or Joko Beck, but I suppose it’s helpful if you’re into yoga. The book doesn’t smell like essential oils, but the target audience probably has some handy even today.

One thing I did dispute, though, was a couple of exhortations to leave behind toxic or unuplifting relationships once you start your journey. I bet this eat pray love-styled advice blew up a lot of families when some wives started taking yoga and got this message, and ultimately led to unhappier lives and less vitality for those involved, including the women. But I espouse stoicism, which is not far off of these teachings but definitely differs in vital ways.

Ah, gentle reader. I bought this book in the swirling mists of pre-history where by “pre-history,” I mean before I started tracking book purchases on the blog–probably not long before, as the real book sale frenzies would have not begun before the 21st century–well, not much–although it might come from my Ebay days where I bought books like this for a buck or less each and listed them for a couple of bucks a throw on Ebay. I did come up with boxes of books then, and when I gave up on them, I put them in my sainted mother’s yard sale, and she once set up the night before, and several hundred dollars’ worth of books, or at least books I paid several hundred dollars for, were ruined.

But not this book. It remained in my to-read stacks, most recently (and maybe for 16 years) in the hall between the offices. I must have pulled it out and put it back many times, as I remembered that mid-70s cover with the, what, sasquatchish creature on the cover? The back of the book looked interesting, but not compelling, but eventually the time came to read it, and that time was last week.

So: On a cold planet which has a narrow habitable band between a sun-blasted side and a side where the sun never shines–and where the narrow band has a year of sun and a year of darkness–a species called the Onhla are dying out from a disease which sickens but does not kill the last, Hult. He’s on his way to human settlements with invaluable furs from the starside of the planet where only the Onhla can travel. They’re stolen when he’s sick, though, but they create a sensation as traders from a galactic corporation want more. Hult agrees if the traders will help him to another planet where some Onhla were taken centuries ago so he can find a mate. They do, but the senior trade delegate dies on the return trip, and the more militant and haughty junior member of the group “renegotiates” the deal by demanding additional furs, but Hult renegotiates by killing the two troopers and breaking the back of the now-senior trade manager. Who comes back to the planet generations later (space travel, you know) seeking revenge on the Onhla race and helps the grandson of the previous tyrant to track down a renegade band who can remember the old ways to Starside. The expedition goes bad for everyone.

So, I’m pretty sure I’ve said it before, but some of the midlist (Midlist! The copy I have is a book club edition, which meant people were buying stuff like this in enough quantities to print book club editions, although perhaps this was the bulk of the print run at the time.), the midlist (he repeated so you could remember where we were in the sentence) the midlist science fiction was far more speculative than what you would get later. I guess in 1977, you could find the James Blish Star Trek books, and Star Wars was about to hit big, meaning science fiction would suddenly be awash in space opera. But with these little midlist books, you never knew where they would go. This one skips generations, but with the main character evolving into almost a god amongst the creatures on the planet including the humans whose settlement grows over time (but will probably decline, as the epilogue is the trading company abandoning its contact with the planet).

So perhaps I should not have dodged this book for decades. It made me want to try out more of the era, but maybe not that boxed set whose first volume I picked out the night before last but will likely put back the next time I pass by the chair. I will continue to dodge that boxed set for another decade or maybe forever.